In the spring of 2006, I was approached by a film company to provide an owl for a scene in a London street for a new movie starring Linda Hamilton, Dexter Fletcher, Parminder Nagra, and Susan George and produced by David Frost.
Jaz the tawny owl was selected and behaved brilliantly at the film location in Holland Park Road, West London. The film crew were great, and Linda (of Terminator fame) was amazing, telling me stories of her dogs back in L.A. And coming back to chat after every scene. Jaz looks great in his cameo role. I was even asked to provide an owl call for the scene too, although the sound editor only used half the call!
We both appear in the ‘making of’ feature on the DVD which is available from Amazon.
Click here to visit the film’s MySpace site to see some trailers, but you need the DVD to see Jaz’s performance!
In November '07 I was asked to appear on the BBC 1 magazine programme, The One Show
to participate in a short feature about tawny owls.
Jaz the tawny owl and Misty the barn owl joined me on the couch for the live broadcast
to over 5 million viewers nationwide. The job also gave me an opportunity to meet
the lovely Ellie Harrison and Christine Bleakley, who are as nice off screen as on,
together with Adrian Chiles and comedian, writer and author, Ben Elton.
They say that everyone has their 5 minutes of fame, and I guess this was
mine - it only lasted about 48 hours, but a least I’ve got the video for memories!
